The perfect is the enemy of the good

My name is Beba Alagich and I live in Sydney, Australia. A few days ago I finished reading your book “The History of Bosnia from the Middle Ages to the Present Day” and I wanted to take the time to thank you for having written this book. It was a book, that was extremely harrowing and truly inspirational reading both at the same time.

Your book had a lot of personal meaning for me as my father and mother were both born (1939 and 1942 respectively) in Bosna in a selo near Velika Kladusa. I first came across your book some 5 years ago when I had borrowed it from my local library. I had only managed to read a small portion of it before I decided I wasn’t quite ready to read it all so I returned it to the library thinking I could borrow it again later. Only a few weeks ago, I saw the exact copy from the library (which had now, been withdrawn) in a Second hand shop in my suburb and I thought it is time now for me to find out about my own Bosnian Cultural background so I purchased the book.

My mother’s memory is deteriorating due to Dementia and my father passed away 4 ½ years ago so finding out about my Bosnian Ancestry in one sense would have been very difficult. I was a year old when my family immigrated to Australia from Austria where they had lived for six years. I grew up very Westernised and disconnected from my Bosnian Ancestry and understanding of it. Bosna was always this alien place to me – somewhere I didn’t relate to at all. My parents never spoke to us about their country of birth in any real depth and I never asked (it wasn’t of much interest to me growing up). I grew up with this real disconnection to my parent’s birthplace and given that, I was 18 years old when I first set foot in that land, that is no surprise I suppose.

Your book has allowed me to draw so much personal understanding about who my parents are, especially in relation to the chapters that discuss the social climate in which my parents were born into. I truly feel it is a miracle that my parents and their families actually survived, even to this day. I can’t explain the depth to which your book has moved me. It was as though something was resonating deeply within my DNA. I cried a lot while reading your book, some reasons were personal and others were just for being human. I have now developed a deep sense of awe and respect about the history of Bosna and some of my own Ancestry there in a broad sense. The richness, tenacity and resilience of the Bosnian people in my view regardless of whether they are Muslim, Croat, Serb or other comes from them being emotionally, mentally, physically and spiritually connected to that land called Bosna. This reminds me somewhat of how the Aboriginal people of Australia view their own connection to their country: Australia. In their time of Dreaming, which is where everything was created, Aborigines say that they came from the land (this is meant quite literally out of the land – like the earth gave birth to them so to speak).

My father’s love for Bosna was unwavering. My father loved Bosna right up to the end of his life, it was a place that was deep within his heart – this was something I just didn’t understand. I now understand where that came from, thanks to your book and your work. Your book has also given me a new sense of acceptance and admiration for my Bosnian Ancestry that I would never have had otherwise. I can even see how some of my own personality traits are actually quite Bosnian. I always hated growing up in Australia knowing we had no extended family here, mainly because I never had the opportunity to fully understand where some of the traits that run through my family actually came from. It was only a few years ago that I found out that my mother’s father was a Partisan and he fought as a freedom fighter to liberate his homeland. I didn’t really know what that term Partisan actually meant until I read your book. I know genetically I carry his fighting spirit (I always wondered where I got that from). I have always had a strong sense of when something is socially unjust that it needs to be righted for all to benefit from and it is one reason I think why I trained as a Social Worker; so that I could help people in their time of need.

I was very impressed with your capacity to be truly unbiased and objective with how you wrote this book. You presented the facts and the facts alone and acknowledged when not enough evidence was available to say outright that such and such occurred. It was evident to me that the 10 years you spent doing research for this book you made sure it was thorough. I’ve never had much interest in Modern History; however, I was totally fascinated by it all because of your book. I was also taken back by the sheer complexity and volume of Bosnian history and especially the Politics of this region (I was quite ignorant to it all, to some degree).

Your passion on this topic is obvious. I understand why you passionately defend your work when it is criticised by others (which I noticed while endeavouring to find an email address for you off the internet). You are obviously a person with a very strong sense of integrity about your work.

I have spent some time myself contemplating what it means to be Bosnian since I read your book. There will never be a neat way of defining what that is but there are definitely many layers to it. For me, in a broad way, what it may mean in its purist sense encompasses a people regardless of nationality, ethnicity or religion (that identify with that land) and who possess a deep soulful quality which is reflected in their capacity to have such open hearts, being unconditional, having altruistic natures and a generosity of spirit that embodies a true sense of humanity. Let something like this be the higher truth for what it means to be Bosnian given Bosna and its people have endured so much pain, suffering and tragedy and for so long.

Humans are capable of much greatness and they are capable of real evil as seen in the atrocities that occurred towards the end of last Century within and around Bosna. These are stark examples of the rawness of what it means to live with being human; it can be bloody ugly and insane at times. I am so grateful that my parents through the way we were raised instilled in us by their example that there is good and bad everywhere in people regardless of where they came from originally. What really matters is being able to be tolerant, kind hearted and compassionate to others.

Before I finish I wanted to share with you a personal experience of mine about growing up in Australia which highlights the type of bigotry that has and most probably stills exists within the former Yugoslavia (as the country my parents grew up in). Bigotry is something that people carry with them when they move to other countries; their cultural baggage goes with them, as I’m sure you are aware.

I had an Elderly neighbour who was a Croat from Croatia (to use your phrasing) living near my family. I have known this neighbour since I was 12 years old. My neighbour was widowed in 1972, never remarried and raised 2 sons alone. My neighbour was a very proud person and was born in 1922 (and will be 91 this year). About 9 months ago, my neighbour had ¾’s of their right leg amputated due to complications from being a Diabetic. My neighbour now lives in a Croatian Nursing Home named after Cardinal Stepinac in Western Sydney (now that I know who he is, this name makes sense to me thanks to your book). Up until 5 years ago, my neighbour was living in their own home with their eldest son (until he got married and moved 2 hours away). With my neighbour’s declining health and pretty much next to no help from the 2 sons, my family and I took upon ourselves out of compassion and our deep sense of feeling towards our neighbour (to help and provide daily care – as much as we could). Sometimes this meant attending on a daily basis even twice a day to see if my neighbour needed help/assistance or medical attention. In February 2012, one evening while I was at my neighbour’s home she turned to me totally out of the blue and said that I would have never believed that your family being Muslim would have ever helped me as much as we had. I could see my neighbour was truly grateful, she then looked at me more intently and her eyes welling up with tears and then said to me that it didn’t matter what faith or religion a person had, what mattered the most is what is in their heart. This really surprised me because my neighbour was not one to talk about their feelings in such an open way. My neighbour was a very reserved person. I’m not sure whether their strong Catholicism contributed to that or not.

In those few sentences my neighbour spoke to me, it hit me like a ton of bricks when it dawned on me something that I had wondered about them for 32 years. Whenever I saw my neighbour especially on my way past their house from school, I would always ask if there was anything that I could help her with? Each time my neighbour said no thank you to me. Regardless I asked again and again and again and each time I got exactly the same response. I knew instinctively that there was something more there than just pride, but I couldn’t put my finger on it so to speak. So that night last year in February, I realised my neighbour’s behaviour over all those years was due to their own Religious and Cultural bigotry. I don’t begrudge my neighbour one bit at all; she is a product of her time, generation and upbringing. Having studied Sociology and Anthropology in my second degree I found my neighbour’s behaviour quite fascinating actually. God bless her, if someone of my neighbour’s age is capable of such a profound internal shift in their consciousness than there is real hope for not only Bosna and its people (and the Former Yugoslavia) but for all of humanity. If only people understood that we are all connected, what happens to one, affects us all as a whole. That is why wars are so absurd, (except for those people who profit from war).

Marko I would like you to know that your Historical research is not only important in an Academic sense, it is invaluable to people like myself. I have gained so much personal insight into my Bosnian Ancestry in a broad way that I would not have been able to obtain in such detail from any other source/s, not even from my own relatives. There are 10s of thousands of people that make up part of the Global Bosnian Diaspora; I think your work should be read by everyone with a cultural connection to the former Yugoslavia – just from an educational perspective. I look at the various Ethnic groups from the former Yugoslavia here in Sydney, especially the younger generations who on the most part have never even been to the former Yugoslav Republic and its states. These young people especially with Croatian and Serbian Ancestry (I notice in particular) have a really intense and rigid Nationalistic mind set, which I don’t understand at all. It can get really violent between these 2 groups, especially when they come together and play soccer and their overly zealous fans – it is not about sport in some cases it is about Nationalistic pride. I don’t know what it is like in the UK? However, this makes no sense to me especially when they are like 3rd and 4th or 5th generation Australians – I can only assume that these individuals have been unable to integrate successfully in to the broader Australian culture and hold onto to some fantasy/ ideal that is in some way a distortion of their own parent’s upbringing. I have always regarded myself as an Australian who happens to have Bosnian Ancestry. Australia is the only country I grew up in, I was socialised here and I identify with that more strongly than with being Bosnian per se.

I’ve opened a new chapter in understanding my own family and Bosnian cultural background. Some of my family members are very keen to read your work as well. I look forward to hearing from them about their thoughts and opinions on your book, especially from the next generation.

Thank you again for having written this book, bless you and good luck for what will obviously be your life’s work studying the Balkans in one form or another.

The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) has had a bumpy journey since its foundation in 1993. It has long been condemned by Serb and to a lesser extent Croat nationalists, as well as by left-wing and right-wing hardliners in the West, as a political court set up to serve the interests of the Great Powers. But until recently, it has been supported by liberals in the former Yugoslavia and in the West and beyond, as a positive and necessary exercise in international justice – albeit one that has not produced very satisfactory results. In recent months, however, a realignment has taken place: former supporters of the ICTY have begun to condemn it in the same ‘anti-imperialist’ terms used by the nationalists, and to present its judgements as the work of Great Power intrigue. Their anger has focused above all on the figure of Judge Theodor Meron, President of the ICTY. Meron is a Polish Jew by birth and a Holocaust survivor, who emigrated to Israel, was educated at the University of Jerusalem, and served as legal advisor to the Israeli Foreign Ministry and as Israel’s ambassador to Canada and to the UN, before emigrating to the US. Meron is no Zionist hawk; in 1967, he wrote a memo for Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol advising against the building of settlements in the newly occupied West Bank and Golan Heights. Yet with a sad inevitability, his Jewish and Israeli background have taken on a sinister prominence in the current campaign against him.

Abortion is something so horrible it has to be described with euphemisms: ‘a woman’s right to control her own body’; ‘a woman’s right to control her reproductive choices’. But the most common is ‘a woman’s right to choose’. The sentence is left incomplete: it is short for ‘a woman’s right to choose between a pregnancy she fears may destroy her financially or professionally, possibly even physically, and the killing of the baby in her womb.’

In other words, many if not most women who have abortions feel they have no choice. Overworked women with low incomes, unsupportive families, unsympathetic employers, no partners and/or existing children to care for may simply be unable to cope with a baby; nursery care in the UK is prohibitively expensive – on average around £50 per child under two per day in London. Women may find their careers or education derailed by pregnancy. Not to mention the stigma attached to unplanned pregnancy, particularly for teenagers; this may literally be fatal for those whose relatives are of the ‘honour killing’ variety.

“I’d prefer Assad to win.” Not his actual words, but that is the only conclusion to be derived from the suggestion of Boris Johnson, the London mayor, that arming the Syrian opposition would lead to British weapons in the hands of “al-Qaida-affiliated thugs”. With 93,000 of Syria’s citizens dead, a kill rate in the country higher than in post-invasion Iraq, and one of the world’s most murderous and tyrannical regimes poised to win a historic victory thanks to western inaction, Johnson can only fret about hypothetical dangers.

In fact, it is the west’s failure militarily to support the Syrian National Coalition and its principal military counterpart, the Free Syrian Army (FSA), that is strengthening the hand of al-Qaida in Syria.

Continue reading at The Guardian, where this article was published on 18 June.

About

A blog devoted to political commentary and analysis, with a particular focus on South East Europe. Born in 1972, I have been studying the history of the former Yugoslavia since 1993, and am intimately acquainted with, and emotionally attached to, the lands and peoples of Croatia, Bosnia-Hercegovina and Serbia. In the summer of 1995, I acted as translator for the aid convoy to the Bosnian town of Tuzla, organised by Workers Aid, a movement of solidarity in support of the Bosnian people. In 1997-1998 I lived and worked in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Hercegovina. In 1998-2001 I lived and worked in Belgrade, Serbia, and was resident there during the Kosovo War of 1999. As a journalist, I covered the fall of Milosevic in 2000. I worked as a Research Officer for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in 2001, and participated in the drafting of the indictment of Slobodan Milosevic.

I received my BA from the University of Cambridge in 1994 and my PhD from Yale University in 2000. I was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow of the British Academy in 2001-2004, a member of the Faculty of History of the University of Cambridge in 2001-2006, an Associate Professor at Kingston University in 2006-2017, and am currently an Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science and International Relations of the Sarajevo School of Science and Technology, affiliated with the University of Buckingham. This blog was launched while I was living in Surbiton in the UK. I am based in Sarajevo and London.